Mommy's Best Games, Inc. is an independent game developer founded in 2007. Our seventh game, currently in development, is Pig Eat Ball on which we started working in 2013. This is behind the scenes thoughts about game development and marketing.

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Yes, I'll be taking Pig Eat Ball to E3 to show the game off to publishers and platform holders.
Since we'll be demoing the game soon at E3, recent work has been about "first impressions".

Andrew Curry, our level builder has been working to perfect the first levels of the game, as those first few minutes are the most important with any new players.

Talk to the Clam... to see some action!

In the game, the player completes sets of action levels. If they complete a set of action levels, they get a Pearl, and this Pearl is used to unlock new areas and eventually complete the story in Adventure mode (think the Stars in Super Mario Galaxy).
A set of levels is controlled by a Royal Clam. So the first Clam in the game, has three levels. Those three levels have been tricky to perfect! And actually it started out as five levels and then four levels.. but I think now that three levels in a row is the perfect amount of playing time to introduce players.

Matthew Barnes, one of our programmers, has been working on some new gameplay elements, including a working shower.

Barfies come in ,but leave sparkling clean!

What does the shower do? It cleans off the barf of course! :)

John Meister, head of Super Soul Studios, in nearby Lexington Kentucky, has been working on integrating the new controller remapping system. John was previously using the system called "InControl", but has settled on another controller solution called "Rewired" from the Unity Asset store.

So many collisions to deal with...

And I've been working on optimizations. Without giving away too much, let's just say that thousands of chunks of barf can be spewing in the game. And that's interactive barf--not just simple particle effects! Add to that tons of balls and dozens of pillbug enemies with complicated AI which could be running around as well--with that all happening, on some of our laptops, we noticed the game was starting to get slow. So I've spent the last few weeks, trying to eliminate unnecessary collision calls, and figuring out tricks to avoid comparing so many objects together, or other ways to save processor time. The good news is--things are speeding up!